Catholic Commentary

Jeremiah 33:12–13

Pastoral Renewal: Flocks and Shepherds Across the Land

¹²Yahweh of Armies says: “Yet again there will be in this place, which is waste, without man and without animal, and in all its cities, a habitation of shepherds causing their flocks to lie down.¹³In the cities of the hill country, in the cities of the lowland, in the cities of the South, in the land of Benjamin, in the places around Jerusalem, and in the cities of Judah, the flocks will again pass under the hands of him who counts them,” says Yahweh.

What does Jeremiah 33:12–13 mean?

Jeremiah 33:12–13 promises that the desolate, depopulated land of Judah will be restored as shepherds return with their flocks across every region of the promised land. The specific image of flocks passing under the hand of one who counts them emphasizes the intimate pastoral care and individual knowledge that will characterize the restoration, with each animal personally accounted for rather than lost or scattered.

Key Insight

God's promise to restore a ruined land begins not with armies or power, but with shepherds who count their flocks—a vision that the God who notices individuals will miss no one.

Commentary

Jeremiah 33:12 — Waste Restored to Habitation

Jeremiah speaks these words during the siege of Jerusalem (cf. 33:1), when Babylonian forces have already reduced much of Judah to rubble. The phrase "this place, which is waste, without man and without animal" is not merely rhetorical flourish — it evokes the anti-creation language of the book's earlier judgments (cf. 4:23–26, where the land returns to tohu wabohu, formless and void). The double absence — no human being, no beast — signals a reversal of the Edenic order, a land emptied of the blessing promised in Deuteronomy 28. Against this backdrop, the divine oracle is strikingly specific: Yahweh does not promise the return of armies or monarchs first, but of shepherds. The Hebrew רֹעִים (roʿim) refers to literal herdsmen, but the word carries enormous symbolic weight throughout the prophetic literature, where both kings and God himself are described as shepherds of Israel (Ezek 34; Ps 23). That shepherds will be the first settlers is programmatic: the restoration of right pastoral order — care, feeding, protection, rest — is the foundation of renewed civilization. The phrase "causing their flocks to lie down" (מַרְבִּיצִים, marbitsim) is the same vocabulary used in Psalm 23:2 ("He makes me lie down in green pastures"), evoking not only material peace but the spiritual rest that belongs to a people reconciled to their God.

Jeremiah 33:13 — The Geographic Catalogue and the Counting Hand

Verse 13 unfolds as a deliberate geographical survey of the entire promised land: the hill country (the central ridge, including Hebron), the Shephelah (the lowland foothills toward Philistia), the Negev (the South), Benjamin (the tribal territory immediately north of Jerusalem), the environs of Jerusalem itself, and the broader cities of Judah. This list is not decorative. It mirrors similar geographical inventories in Joshua (10:40; 15:20ff.) and recalls the tribal allotments of the covenantal inheritance. Every zone of the promised land — high and low, south and center, rural and peri-urban — will be repopulated. No corner of the inheritance will be left forsaken. The climactic image is the flocks passing "under the hands of him who counts them" (תַּעֲבֹרְנָה הַצֹּאן עַל יְדֵי מוֹנֶה, taʿavernah hatsoʾn ʿal yedei moneh). This is a specific pastoral practice: the shepherd holds a rod horizontally, and each sheep passes beneath it as he counts them one by one (cf. Lev 27:32; Ezek 20:37). The counting is not bureaucratic — it is the act of a shepherd who knows each animal by its passage beneath his hand. In the Hebrew imagination, to be counted is to be known, cared for, and claimed. The flock that has been scattered, lost, or consumed by the nations will once again belong to someone who counts — and therefore someone who notices the missing one.

Typological and Spiritual Senses

The literal sense grounds a prophetic typology fulfilled in Christ the Good Shepherd (John 10:11–16), who "calls his own sheep by name" and whose flock will be drawn from every region. The geographical comprehensiveness of verse 13 anticipates the universal scope of the New Covenant: the Church is gathered not from one tribe or region but from every nation. The counting-hand of the shepherd finds its New Testament echo in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15:4–7), where the ninety-nine are left so that the one may be found. The Eucharistic assembly — the Church gathered in every city and village — is the living fulfillment of Jeremiah's vision: flocks passing under the hand of the Great Shepherd across every landscape.

Catholic Commentary

Catholic tradition reads the shepherd imagery of the Old Testament as a continuous thread leading to the self-revelation of Christ in John 10, and the Church Fathers were attentive to this passage's place in that typology. St. Jerome, commenting on Jeremiah, noted that the restoration of literal shepherds in the land of Judah pointed beyond itself to the pastores of the Church — bishops and priests — who would extend Christ's shepherding across all regions of the world. The geographic comprehensiveness of verse 13 maps onto the Catholic understanding of the Church's universality: catholicos means precisely "according to the whole," and Jeremiah's enumeration of every district of the land prefigures a Church that leaves no territory of the human heart unclaimed.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church, drawing on Lumen Gentium, teaches that Christ is "the one Shepherd" in whom all pastoral office participates (CCC 874, 1548). The ordained ministry does not replace Christ's shepherding but makes it sacramentally present. This is why the image of the shepherd "counting" the flock carries such weight: the Catholic tradition of the Church's concern for every individual soul — expressed in pastoral care, the sacrament of Penance, anointing of the sick — reflects the counting-hand of Jeremiah's shepherd.

Pope Francis, in Evangelii Gaudium §49, quotes this precise pastoral sensibility: shepherds who smell like their sheep, who are present to the particular, the local, the individual. The promise that every city and region of Judah will see its flocks restored resonates with the Church's mission of inculturation and local pastoral presence in every culture and geography. Jeremiah's oracle, far from being a merely agrarian consolation, becomes in Catholic reading a charter for the universal and particular nature of the Church's pastoral mission.

For Today

For Catholics today, these two verses offer a potent corrective to pastoral discouragement. Many dioceses in the Western world resemble, in some ways, Jeremiah's description of verse 12: parishes closed, communities thinned, landscapes that once bustled with Catholic life now strangely quiet. The oracle does not pretend this devastation is not real — it names it directly ("waste, without man and without animal") — but it refuses to let desolation have the last word.

The counting-hand of verse 13 is a particular invitation. In an age of mass anonymity and digital abstraction, where individuals can feel like statistics rather than souls, Jeremiah's shepherd counts each animal as it passes under his hand. This is the model for every Catholic engaged in pastoral ministry — the teacher who notices the student who stopped coming to class, the priest who remembers the parishioner who hasn't been to Mass in months, the lay minister who follows up on the family that drifted away. To count is to love. The flocks cannot renew the land if the shepherd does not first notice that someone is missing. Concretely, this passage calls every Catholic to ask: who in my parish, my family, my community has not yet passed under a caring hand this week?

Cross-References

Ezekiel 34:11–16 commentary — God's great 'I myself will search for my sheep' oracle is the direct prophetic parallel to Jeremiah's promise, presenting Yahweh as the shepherd who gathers, counts, and restores the scattered flock of Israel to every region of the land.
John 10:11–16 commentary — Christ's self-identification as the Good Shepherd who knows each sheep by name and lays down his life for them is the New Testament fulfillment of Jeremiah's image of the shepherd whose hand counts every animal.
Luke 15:4–7 commentary — The parable of the lost sheep — where the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to find the one — enacts the logic of the counting-hand in Jeremiah 33:13, where each sheep passing under the shepherd's rod is individually known and claimed.
Psalms 23:1–3 commentary — The Shepherd Psalm's imagery of making the flock 'lie down in green pastures' uses the same Hebrew root (*marbits*) as Jeremiah 33:12, linking both texts in their vision of divine-pastoral rest and restored shalom.
Leviticus 27:32 commentary — The tithe law prescribing that every tenth animal 'pass under the rod' provides the precise cultural and ritual background for the counting-hand image in Jeremiah 33:13, grounding it in covenantal liturgical practice.
Jeremiah 4:23–26 commentary